The infrastructural spread of global connectivity roughly breaks down into two interconnected phases. The first concerns the expansion of commercial satellite remote sensing from around the mid-1990s, allowing innovations in humanitarian remote sensing to take place prior to the rapid spread of mobile telephony. This included developing algorithms for timely data extraction from high-resolution imagery of refugee and other disaster-affected groups. Important here were innovations in the visualization of such data, in the form of layered geographic information system (GIS) maps. The second, or current phase, sometimes known as Web 2.0 (O’Reilly 2005), gathered momentum from the mid-2000s with the rapid spread of broadband connectivity and geolocated mobile telephony. This has significantly enhanced the governmental potentialities of digital technology. Rather than simply being sensed from afar, the precariat have become active producers of exponentially expanding volumes of data in their own right. Since the latter part of the 2000s, emergencies have been real-world laboratories for innovations in data-based sense-making (Meier 2015). The ability to combine remote sensing from space – and, increasingly, from ground sensors (Gabrys 2016) – with mobile data informatics constitutes post-humanitarianism’s conditions of existence.
Digital connectivity is both infrastructural and ontological. As well as being an engineered system of satellites, towers, cables, data warehouses and screen interfaces, this mnemotechnic, or recording and memorizing infrastructure, calls forth post-humanist, behaviourist and cognitive ontologies and methodologies. These technologies encourage remoteness from the world, in as much as they spare practioners, journalists and researchers from having to take risks. At the same time, in complex and fluid environments, they ease the burden of thinking and logistical decision-making. They make the automation of humanitarian assistance in challenging environments possible. With an emphasis on the digital recoupment of distance and the central role played by Homo inscius, this chapter outlines the development of remote sensing and data informatics in the humanitarian field.
The increasing use of remote sensing by the aid industry since the end of the 1990s should not be seen as a wholly new departure. Certainly, the actual physical technologies had not been used before. However, in terms of an expanding cybernetic episteme, chapter 5 explored how the NGO-led fantastic invasion of the 1980s was instrumental in the anticipatory transformation of social knowledge into behavioural data. Emergency events were reinterpreted from an ‘early warning’ perspective as emergent complexes of measurable signals and behavioural alerts. Rather than area expertise or tools of historical or social analysis, these signals demanded new field methodologies to record, analyse and initiate timely action. Geospatial remote sensing built on this earlier anticipatory analogue foundation. The view from space gave the necessary distance for greater objectivity.
Like the internet (Lukasik 2011), the application of remote sensing to complex emergences is intrinsically linked to the civilianization of military research and development. It is easy to forget that, as recently as the mid-1990s, high-resolution satellite imagery, the associated sensor technologies and GPS positioning were still classified and restricted (Verjee 2005).1 In the mid-1990s, as part of the wider deregulation, privatization and globalization of the universal fixed infrastructural grid (Collier & Lakoff 2007), the Clinton administration introduced several crucial geospatial2 reforms that allowed the rapid privatization and commercialization of military technologies and data-sets (Verjee 2005). Beginning in 1993, initially a military creation, the satellite-based Global Positioning System (GPS) was progressively opened to civilian use.3 Today, mobile phones can potentially be logged to within several metres at any point on the Earth’s surface. The declassification of military imaging sensors was followed by the authorization of the commercial operation of high-resolution satellites (Hayes 2012). Although the military retains a technological edge and, if necessary, ‘shutter control’ through funding and licensing agreements, civilianization has in many respects reversed the dependencies of the Cold War military-industrial-academic complex in favour of the private and corporate sector.
The military now regularly enters into commercial contracts to purchase geospatial products from independent suppliers, as in the case of commercial satellite imagery of Afghanistan at the start of the international intervention (Ackerman 2001). Civilianization has also been coterminous with a change in military sensing priorities from those that characterized the Cold War. Rather than scanning the Earth for objects and buildings, such as missile sites or armament factories, the main concern now is hunting people (Chamayou 2015 [2013]). This has accompanied a shift towards large-aperture/low-power devices, together with an increased use of computer-generated 3D visualizations (Hayes 2012). This recalibration around the extraction of human features and behavioural data means that the military, humanitarian agencies and human rights organizations are now fellow customers within the same technology marketplace.
During much of the 1990s, humanitarian organizations struggled with the costs of remote imaging and accessing the expertise to interpret it. By the end of the decade, however, led by the UN, especially UNHCR and ICRC, the aid industry was regularly using and experimenting with geospatial technologies. These were accessed through partnerships with public–private space consortia like UNOSAT4 and RESPOND,5 or state-supported research networks like the EU’s Joint Research Centre, or JRC (Hanchard 2012).6 Such first-wave consortia typically brought together, in varying combinations and different terms of agreement, national space agencies, university research facilities, private geospatial companies and the UN or other humanitarian agencies (Verjee 2007). These geospatial partnerships aspired to leverage private-sector technology, expertise and data philanthropy to meet urgent humanitarian needs. This was the background to UNHCR’s first exploration of the use of geospatial technology for refugee management (Bouchardy 1995). By 2000, a detailed geospatial mapping exercise covering refugee camps in Kosovo, Nepal and Kenya had been completed in partnership with ENVIREF,7 a consortium of European geospatial companies (EnviRef 2001). This has been claimed to be the first systematic application of geospatial technology to complex emergencies (Verjee 2005). It successfully demonstrated the feasibility of extracting humanitarian intelligence from commercial high-resolution images of refugee camps and their environs.
Using this experience, at the onset of the 2004 Darfur emergency in Sudan, UNHCR asked UNOSAT to search for groundwater reserves in Chad sufficient to support Darfur refugees (Bally et al. 2005). Within months, the consortium had procured accurate water supply target maps, which UNHCR used to optimize the location of some of its Chad camps. As the emergency deepened, by December 2005 there were 1.5 million Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) within Darfur. UNHCR commissioned RESPOND to supply thematic mapping and route-planning data. Over the next couple of years, besides humanitarian activity maps for the United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (UNOCHA), RESPOND supplied a range of cartographic and logistical products to donors, UN agencies and NGOs (Donnelly 2012). These included area resource maps, aerial camp photography, water availability data, transportation routes, etc. Using ten different sensors from nine spacecraft, RESPOND extracted geospatial data under a number of public–private agreements (Hanchard 2012).
Since the mid-1990s, refugee camps have been increasingly militarized and securitized, and local restrictions on international access have grown. In Darfur, for example, many camps are controlled or contested by opposition groups (Kahn 2008). Refugee and IDP remote sensing has grown in scope and accuracy in concert with growing restrictions on humanitarian access (HERR 2011). The scientific literature on the geospatial dimensions of the Darfur emergency frequently cites the danger on the ground for international aid workers (Sulik & Edwards 2010). From the start of the emergency, the EU’s JRC worked on the problem of remotely measuring Darfur’s volatile IDP populations. By the end of the 2000s, scientists had developed algorithms to do this automatically and to acceptable accuracy, without the need for ground truth (Kranz et al. 2010; Lang et al. 2010; Kemper et al. 2011). By this time, assisted by data philanthropy, organizations like Amnesty International had begun to rent their own satellite time to sense evidence of human rights abuse remotely in places, like Darfur, judged unsafe to put staff on the ground (Prins 2008; Sulik & Edwards 2010). Moreover, by cutting staff travel and analysis time, the automation of feature extraction was lowering the access threshold to remote sensing for small and medium-sized NGOs. One geospatial scientist summarized the affirmatory powers of satellite recoupment as follows: ‘It is a cheap data source with regular recording and can access and document large areas from “no-go” zones continuously and consistently, and thus provide image proof of before-and-after situations that can be produced more accurately, faster and more convincingly to the public than reporting from sources on the ground’ (Prins 2008).
The growing ability to sense, map and extract humanitarian features and data from space has developed dynamically with growing restriction on international humanitarian access (Collinson & Elhawary 2012). As discussed in chapter 7, by the end of the 2000s, the combination of risk aversion, the roll-out of restrictive security protocols and increasing ground friction had combined to produce the phenomenon of the fortified aid compound. As remote sensing grew in accuracy, timeliness and availability, it has also normalized both the absence of and a decreasing reliance on ground truth. Reflecting the impulse of technoscience to turn political negatives into positive technological challenges, access denial is more a technical problem to be overcome rather than a reflection of an emerging nexus of long-term political problems on the ground. The very success of geospatial technologies in terms of sidestepping terrestrial insecurity and political push-back in the course of producing new sense-making tools reinforces the discursive distance between the observer and the observed. When we have these new tools, given the dangers and hassle, why go there? While the loss of ground truth can be lamented, digital recoupment creates new angles and possibilities. Refugees, for example, can now be viewed ecologically as biohuman actors in complex landscapes of limited resources and challenging logistics. Remote sensing, as we shall see, is also argued to bring objectivity, whereas ground truth, while useful, is susceptible to human bias.
Free from the problems and financial cost of being on the ground, through satellite sensing one can visualize the behaviour of refugees both ‘objectively’ and ‘ecologically’. Camps became living parts of their surrounding environments. Revealed by multi-spectral sensors operating at different electromagnetic frequencies, the camp and its inhabitants were transformed into an interactive, multi-levelled feature within a given human/nonhuman milieu (Bouchardy 1995). From the outset, the objectivity of the satellite image was a topic of celebration. Because satellites record ‘what actually exists on the ground, nobody can argue that the information has been omitted or changed, as can be argued if potentially biased individuals or companies carry out field surveys in remote areas’ (Bjorgo 2002). As a UNHCR spokesperson argued, by being able to show from above what’s being done in difficult environments, ‘we can really highlight the challenges we face on the ground and how we tackle them’ (Batty 2008). On the back of the commercialization of geospatial technology, the objectivity of the image underpinned a new wave of NGO public advocacy.
In 2005, Google launched Google Earth as a free, easy-to-programme open mapping platform. As early as 2008, over 350 million copies of Google Earth had already been downloaded (MapAction 2008). In April 2007, in partnership with the human rights group US Holocaust Memorial Museum (USHMM), Google facilitated the Crisis in Darfur project to showcase a new ‘Global Awareness’ layer within the Google Earth platform. As a composite of US military and commercial satellite imagery compiled between 2004 and 2007, unlike a conventional map, the Crisis in Darfur layers allow anyone with access to a screen interface to zoom down from space to see refugee camps, tents and burnt villages close-up while accessing photographs, videos, personal testimonies and agency reports on the way (Parks 2009: 536). The following year, Google released Google Earth Outreach. This combination of free software and technical support was aimed at encouraging more aid agencies to produce and share through the Google platform similar multilevelled visualizations of their aid operations. As part of the Outreach launch, for example, UNHCR created pilot layers highlighting its refugee programmes in Darfur/Chad, Iraq and Colombia (UNHCR 2008). Like the Crisis in Darfur initiative, moving downwards from a regional overview, the viewer is able to explore the lives of refugees in specific locations ‘by clicking on exact locations in the refugee camps to see photos of the facilities, such as health clinics, schools, water taps and sanitation’ (Batty 2008).
At the same time as these public advocacy mapping initiatives were unfolding, in June 2007, the human rights group Amnesty International (AI) began its satellite-based Eyes on Darfur initiative. The Enough campaign, endorsed by George Clooney, launched its similar Satellite Sentinel Project in 2010 (SSP 2012). The human rights use of satellite imagery followed the same humanitarian feature extraction processes that had been developing for several years – in this case, using burnt dwellings as a proxy for human rights abuse (Sulik & Edwards 2010). Both of these initiatives enjoyed technical support from geospatial scientists and such companies as ImageSat International, DigitalGlobe and GeoEye (AI 2007). Besides releasing findings to the major news networks, they also used online activists and social media for dissemination.
These advocacy projects were based on the proposition that ‘seeing is believing’ (see Parks 2009). The human rights use of before-and-after satellite photography is based on the purported objectivity of the image (Lavers et al. 2009). A common refrain at the time was that, enabled by corporate philanthropy, human suffering in hard-to-reach places was now being illuminated as never before. It was being brought directly to public attention not in words, but in pictures. People could no longer say that they didn’t know. Google Earth’s multimedia layers were argued to help viewers experience, and thus better intuit, what was really happening on the ground. It was even possible to play a couple of online games that simulated the difficulties of being a refugee (HRE 2009), or an on-the-spot news reporter (Radio Dabanga 2009). Through the ‘veritable media industry’ (Parks 2009: 540) that had emerged around the Darfur crisis, advocates saw themselves creating an informed public force for change without burdening people with the need to read anything, let alone subjecting anyone to the danger of actually going there (Dobbs 2008). As John Prendergast, the co-founder of the Enough Project, said, regarding the David versus Goliath struggle taking place in Darfur, ‘Google Earth just gave David a stone for his slingshot’ (quoted by Parks 2009: 537). Not only could this ammunition be freely gathered without needing access permission, it didn’t risk people on the ground and, apart from mobilizing the public, it reminded authoritarian states that the world was now watching (Lavers et al. 2009).
With the advocacy breakthrough failing to materialize, within a couple of years all of these initiatives had fallen silent and their respective websites were no longer updated. The crisis on the ground in Darfur, however, has continued (Jaspars 2015). At the same time, the Western governments that had initially condemned the actions of the Sudanese government in Darfur have now recalibrated their positions. Indeed, the same Arab militia groups that were responsible for much of the rapine, deaths and displacement have now, apparently, been recruited on behalf of the EU by the same, once-condemned government to prevent African migrants using Darfur as a passage to Libya and thus Europe (Grinstead 2016). These comments are not targeted at the people or agencies that attempted to publicize the dreadful things that were happening in Darfur in the mid- to late 2000s. They are more a reminder that we need to look past the hype and fetishism (Scott-Smith 2013) that surrounds smart technology. If the medium is the message, rather than being enthralled by the images, we need to ask what the medium is saying and where it is taking us.
In chapter 5, it was argued that, as a modernist humanitarian technology, the refugee camp functioned to separate, or wall-off, the politics of forced migration from society. The camp allowed a separation of political and humanitarian identities. The ideological emptying of the camps of any progressive content during the 1980s and, ideally at least, the integration of refugees within the community, saw security expand to encompass the whole of society. We had entered a hyper-political age.
Around the time that remote sensing became commercially viable, there was a growing feeling that, rather than temporary structures, as securitized spaces refugee camps were becoming permanent features. Reflecting the hyper-political, from the early days of humanitarian satellite sensing, camps have been sensed ecologically in terms of their interconnections with their surrounding environments (Bouchardy 1995). Besides available work or cultivable land, this includes refugee access to things like water, firewood or urban services. Remote sensing also facilitates the visualization of camps logistically relative to road quality, natural obstacles like seasonal water courses and distances from major distribution centres, operational agencies or areas of political unrest. Satellite sensing amplifies early warning’s operational demand for timeliness, as well as objectivity. At the start of the 2000s, in terms of the satellites available to the aid industry, the frequency of revisits ranged from every couple of days to one or two weeks. Depending on the system being used, extracted data could be delivered in as little as one or two days (Bjorgo 2002). With aerial surveillance approaching near real-time, changes in camp size, even abrupt ones, can now be monitored remotely. At the same time, regular overflights mean that the environmental impact of camps – for example, in terms of land or forestry degradation – can be longitudinally mapped over months or years.
Separated by a techno-discursive distance between the observer and the observed, remote sensing reveals objects on the ground and, through the digital traces left by their behaviour, it is possible to visualize the refugee as an objectively surveilled subject (Harris 2006). With the history and politics of forced migration consigned to the background, the biohuman essence of the refugee moves to the foreground. The hyper-political subject of containment becomes an ecological and relational calculus of risk, associated with water availability, soil conditions, energy reserves, nutritional needs, logistical networks, medical services, sanitation infrastructure and preparedness for future uncertainty. In terms of realizing this ecological biohuman essence, however, remote satellite sensing by itself can only go so far. Remote sensing had sidestepped the problem of ground friction and access denial while creating new, objective and timely sense-making tools. There was still something missing, however.
By the mid-2000s, for example, satellites could identify individual buildings and dwellings within a given refugee camp. The anticipated next step was providing ‘a kind of “zip code” and address for each inhabitant and family [to facilitate] the management of the evolution of the camp and its population’ (Bally et al. 2005: 39). Although even temporary structures could now be given a grid reference, the individual behaviour of the biohumans within them could not be recorded, authenticated or predicted. While the camp could be visualized ecologically, the individuals within it could not be known – or, therefore, governed. This would be addressed through the rapid spread of mobile telephony that was occurring as the Darfur crisis was happening. The arrival of Big Data would complete the cybernetic transition from knowledge to data that first started in the humanitarian field in the 1980s.
Except among Luddites, following its US countercultural rehabilitation during the 1970s and 1980s, the perception of computer technology is now free of earlier New Left concerns that it was a tool of corporate control and alienation. By the 1990s, computers had emerged reborn as the new economy’s provider and guarantor of freedom, choice and personal creativity (Turner 2006). Given their steady diffusion throughout society, it now seems remarkable that, as recently as the mid-2000s, when the term ‘Big Data’ first emerged, using the logs of geolocational mobile devices to study behavioural dynamics was still experimental (Eagle & Pentland 2006). This was around the time of the launch of Google Earth, and the Darfur crisis becoming one of its first Global Awareness layers. Much of the foundational research on data informatics, especially its potential for new business and advertising models, was anticipatory and happening ahead of the rapid expansion of broadband connectivity (O’Reilly 2005). From the outset, it was realized that, by the very nature of the medium, mobile telephony makes it ‘an ideal vehicle to study both individuals and organisations’ (Eagle & Pentland 2006: 225). Knowing the content of calls or messages was unnecessary since structure emerges from routine. Logging the when, where and who of usage over time was sufficient to reveal the ‘large-scale dynamics of human behaviour’ (2006: 263). Enthused by the promise of mobile geolocationality, the latter half of the 2000s was an optimistic and expansionary time for the new business ventures of Silicon Valley.8
When social media was still in its youth, its rapid emergence promised to rejuvenate democracy through new forms of direct engagement, participation and active citizenship. Connectivity was the new socius that, in appearing to decentralize power, was argued to be creating new opportunities for progressive expression (see Reid 2009). In June 2009, for example, as hundreds of thousands of Iranians demonstrated in Tehran’s Freedom Square against the impending election of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the opening shots of the ‘Twitter Revolution’ were optimistically welcomed (Washington Times 2009). This emancipatory techno-optimism was also being extended to disasters. Building on the increasing use of remote satellite sensing among aid agencies, the main interest was in the implications of the rapid spread of broadband and mobile telephony, including within the global South. Spurred by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 (Crutcher & Zook 2009), in the two or three years prior to the Haiti earthquake (2010), ‘crisis informatics’ as a distinct area of operational possibility emerged in Europe and the USA (Muhren & de Walle 2010; Palen et al. 2010). Evidence culled from the records of mobile usage among people caught in college shootings, floods, forest fires, infrastructural breakdowns or contagious outbreaks in the global North was already showing that the new information technologies could play a transformational role in the way society responds to mass emergencies. Indeed, one could start to reframe disasters radically: ‘as a set of socially-distributed information activities that support powerful, parallel, socio-technical processing of problems in times of change and disruption. Good quality information and meta-information that indicates accuracy and trustworthiness is what people need to make local decisions, to gain situational awareness and build resilience in the face of threat’ (emphasis added, Palen et al. 2010: 10).
At the same time that academics were exploring the potential of crisis informatics to leverage systematically the ‘collective intelligence of the public’ (2010: 10), the UN launched its anticipatory Global Pulse project (UNGP 2009: 13). Alerted by the openness and vulnerability of the global precariat to the recent effects of the financial crisis, Global Pulse brings together UN agencies and the private sector to develop new approaches to behavioural analysis through the medium of Big Data. Encouraged by the promise of crisis informatics, the diffusion of data science to the international plane was seen as constituting ‘a genuine opportunity to bring powerful new tools to the fight against poverty, hunger and disease’ (2009: 4).
It is important to emphasize that the repositioning of disasters as socially distributed information systems, which Global Pulse embraces and exemplifies, has several supporting ontological and epistemological elements. Initially called crisis informatics, the structural transformation in question lacks a commonly agreed name. While subsequently attracting labels like ‘digital humanitarianism’ (Conneally 2011; Meier 2015), ‘disaster relief 2.0’ (Crowley & Chan 2011), ‘cyber-humanitarianism’ (Duffield 2013) or ‘humanitarian innovation’ (Betts & Bloom 2014), in the main, authors or agencies usually just allude to the changing nature of humanitarianism in the age of Big Data, or something similar (UNOCHA 2013). However, since the end of the 2000s, the core assumptions and propositions that constitute this transformation have been more or less continually reproduced in many different fora and publications.
All of these key assumptions can be traced to the NGO-led fantastic invasion of the 1980s. Here they emerged in an anticipatory form. They were experimental tools in a terrestrial struggle to convert history and politics into information and data. With the arrival of global connectivity they ceased being anticipatory; they have arrived. They now cohere and work together as a closed post-humanist operational logic. As they are now mutually reinforcing, some of the core assumptions and supporting arguments are rehearsed below. Besides seeing these elements as interconnecting and mutually supporting, it is also useful to consider this operational logic as a business model in its own right.
In infrastructural terms, growing connectivity has a downside. Due to cascading and multiplier effects, in a rapidly urbanizing world, the increasing frequency of disasters is now widely accepted, as is the inevitability that they will impact more people (Pelosky 2002). Further, contributing to this vulnerability, at an international level, ‘our global economic system may have become more prone to large and swift swings in the past few years’ (UNGP 2009: 11). Because this inevitability is hedged with uncertainties, however, while one can be alert, it is impossible to be fully prepared. Moreover, it is important to note that this is occurring at a time of austerity. Reasonable people can no longer expect, or take for granted, that public emergency cover will keep pace with this growing exposure. Humanitarian innovation anticipates the challenge of surviving in landscapes where any social contract between individuals, corporations or states is absent. Rather than a problem as such, these landscapes create opportunities to become something better.
As a form of radical self-help, digital humanitarianism embraces the centrality of resilience. Mobile phone usage confirms what has long been suspected. Rather than waiting for assistance, disaster-affected people and communities are their own first responders.9 In ecological terms, ‘how quickly the damaged part of an ecosystem can repair itself depends on how many feedback loops it has to the non- (or less-) damaged parts of the ecosystem(s)’ (Meier 2013a). For humans, information technology creates the feedback loops or platform between the affected and unaffected within and beyond disaster zones. It thus allows a natural process of self-recovery to take place. Although ‘real time’ does not always mean immediate, feedback loops have to work within a timescale that allows for meaningful action. Mobile telephony, the internet and other software platforms that can build trust and aid coordination can be leveraged by responders, as well as creating ‘relationships and information sharing portals with civilians’ (Giroux 2009: 24). For disaster resilience, rationalizing how unaffected areas, communities and people help the affected through the bridging and logistical capacities of new technology is a key proposition. Thus, timely information is of equal – if not greater – importance than food, water or shelter.
Homo inscius, or the necessary ignorance of the neoliberal subject, haunts the pages of this book. Building on the growing existential remoteness of international aid workers following their risk-related retreat into fortified aid compounds, Homo inscius has become a central player in the way crisis informatics reconfigures the cognitive landscape of disaster zones. Sudden disasters create arenas of fluid and constantly changing stimuli and signals that, by their nature, subject human decision-making to the stress of operational immediacy. New sense-making tools are required to redress the loss of meaning resulting from unexpected changes that ‘break the imaginary link between expectation and reality and force actors to revaluate what they are doing and where they should go’ (Muhren & de Walle 2010: 30). Disasters become post-humanist sites of unmediated empirical factuality resulting from the removal of familiar points of reference while challenging subjects to choose quickly between contradictory signals and demands. Research on sense-making, however, has shown that, despite cognitive dissonance, people do act; they do not wait passively, and, moreover, they give credence to ‘what other people think and understand, and they take into account other people’s reactions when they act’ (2010: 30). This applies to the disaster-affected as well as emergency responders. This human condition creates a need for bridging information support systems that remove the burden of deciding. Such systems provide a behavioural guide in times of flux by facilitating sense-making through the timely exchange of value-added information between those who need help and those who can provide it.
Global connectivity radically extends the limits of spatial separation between the unaffected and the affected within disaster zones. These now stretch beyond the global South to encompass digital humanitarians working on the other side of screen interfaces beyond the barriers created to restrict and contain global migration. Regarding the early discussion of the fortified aid compound, increased connectivity allows for the appearance of the hyper-bunker. Many times removed from the disaster zone, the hyper-bunker multiplies the mobility differential of digital humanitarians. While there are earlier precedents of volunteer disaster mapping, the Haiti earthquake in 2010 proved the feasibility of data-mining social media and SMS messaging to extract timely humanitarian intelligence. This included identifying areas in need, together with points of refuge, which could not have been easily replicated on the ground. At the same time, this was made accessible to responders and affected alike through sense-making dynamic maps and messaging services. Importantly, however, it also demonstrated that this platform service could be provided through crowdsourcing the data cleaning and embedding work to new networks of young and largely self-organizing Volunteer Technical Communities (VTCs) (see Burns 2014).10 Through their dependence on private ‘data philanthropy’, such VTCs have emerged alongside the growing humanitarian profile of Silicon Valley corporations like Google, Twitter and Facebook, together with large telecommunication companies such as Vodafone and Orange.
Within the canon of progressive neoliberalism, the transformation of emergencies into socially distributed information systems has, according to Tim McNamara of the Open Knowledge Foundation, not only involved a technological shift ‘but also the rapid decentralisation of power’ (quoted by Meier 2012). This decentralization has empowered new humanitarian actors, such as the hyper-bunkered voluntary crisis mappers, as well as the disaster-affected themselves. Whereas aid agencies once made all the decisions, people now have the informational tools to say what they need. In this way, ‘communities and individuals are determining how to help themselves and how they want to be helped by others, mobilizing local, national and sometimes global support to meet their needs’ (UNOCHA 2013: 13):
Anyone can create information and interact with other people’s information with a basic mobile phone. Coupled with the opportunities of Big Data and GIS technology … a true partnership is possible in which citizens, communities and humanitarian actors collect data from a wide array of sources; transform raw data, through analysis, into useful information; freely share information with one another; and act on that information to save lives and prevent suffering. (UNOCHA 2013: 24–5)
Already discussed in relation to the fantastic invasion, this purported digital decentralization of power continues the post-Fordist trend of flattening professional hierarchies in the name of greater public participation (see Negroponte 2003 [1975]). One could argue that the folding downwards of smart technology is more about the hyper-centralization of power, as in the form of platform capitalism (Srnicek 2016). Moreover, the claims for empowerment are bound up in legitimizing both a commercial bid for a stake in the humanitarian market and the remote technologies that are employed. Thus, the traditional model of humanitarian agency which is funded and based in the global North, and which collects, analyses, decides and delivers assistance to the South, ‘is now out of date’ (UNOCHA 2013: 16, 23). The techniques developed by ground-based humanitarian actors, such as trying to get ‘as close to the affected area as possible, find out what was happening and transmit that information to their superiors, sometimes by hand, sometimes in person’, are now effectively redundant (UNOCHA 2013: 23; also Meier 2012). As a way of cementing these breaks, the radicalism of progressive neoliberalism – its rush to the future – is reflected in its direct embrace of the new economy and its vision of an empowering partnership between commercial technoscience and the global precariat.
In April 2013, to the applause of the new humanitarian actors (Meier 2013b), UNOCHA published its Humanitarianism in the Network Age report, which provides a state-of-the-art overview of disaster informatics, and the Volunteer Technical Communities and private companies involved, as well as outlining a programme of development. Soon afterwards, the International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies (IFRC) followed with its own World Disasters Report entitled Focus on Technology and the Future of Humanitarian Intervention (IFRC 2013). While anticipated for a while, these publications mark the coming of age of the crisis informatics that underpins post-humanitarianism. The reports interconnect and reproduce all the core operational assumptions outlined above. Remote sensing is seen as giving a new objectivity to disaster zones. The refugee camp, for example, can now be viewed in relationship to its environment, and refugees reinterpreted in terms of the opportunities and constraints revealed. At the same time, there is a consensus that disasters are becoming more complex and their impact greater. Regarding the latter, the rapid flux of events in a disaster also disrupts normal cognition. They are events that exemplify the challenged nature of Homo inscius – both as a subject requiring assistance and, more importantly, one that needs to be taught how to help itself. In this context, the development of crisis informatics appears fortuitous. Disaster-affected communities and those responding to such events have been rediscovered as distributed information systems. Not only has this allowed new humanitarian actors to appear, it is argued to have decentralized power while making new sense-making tools possible. In taking this analysis further, the next chapter considers the set of practices known as humanitarian innovation. This initiative addresses the infrastructural crisis through the development of personalized objects and self-acting technologies that, together with crisis informatics, are capable of supporting individuated forms of nomadic off-grid existence.